You Select "Something Else." I have just converted my 11.04 to 11.10. And I did not lose any data or settings.
When the partition manager opens, you select each partition in turn and click Change and then mark those same partitions with the same mount points as they have now but you do not, I repeat do not, mark the /home partition to be formatted. You can mark / and /boot ( if you have one ) to be formatted. This will clear out completely any old files that may conflict with the new install.
In this way the relevant parts of Ubuntu will be installed into / and /boot but the /home partition will not be touched.
You will need to re-install any programs that you installed since 10.10 was installed but they will detect their configuration files in /home as will the default programs for the install.
May I give you some advice? Before you install backup Evolution and Firefox and install Thunderbird and import your Evolution settings/emails into Thunderbird. Do this because Thunderbird is the default email client and not Evolution. So, if you have already converted to Thunderbird you will have email from the beginning without having to install Evolution. Unless you prefer Evolution.
Backup everything just in case.
Regards.
I would argue for a single /
partition in the SSD (60GB, as you have envisioned) to keep everything Ubuntu, including the /home
folder.
A separate /home
partition is useful:
(1) when one plans to try out different distributions of Linux (also known as "distros")
or
(2) when one may want to re-install Ubuntu without destroying the personal files and settings in /home
.
The second reason is a bit less important now, as newer versions of Ubuntu installation process will detect existing Ubuntu and offer to preserve the /home folder when installing over.
On the other hand, if you keep /home
as a folder of /
you won't have to worry about how much to allocate to /
and how much to allocate to /home
. If your program files (games) take some more space, all you have to do is move your personal data to the HDD.
By now you must be thinking why not put /home
in the HDD?
The only reason I prefer /home
to be in the SDD is because /home
stores not only your personal data, but it also stores your personal settings for all programs. This includes changes you make to the desktop or any other program settings, your browser bookmarks, etc. When you load a program from SSD but the personal settings are in HDD, it slows loading that program a tiny bit. Keeping /
and /home
both in the SSD will get you the fastest load time.
Keep large data such as music, video, saved games, etc. in the HDD
The folders that contain large amount of data, such as Video, can be in the NTFS partition with symbolic links to /home
. This is explained in some detail at: Windows Ubuntu dual boot - Share files between OS
Other large sub-folders of /home
can be partitions in the HDD. For example, if you install a lot of Windows programs and games in WINE, the hidden folder .wine
will grow large. You can create an ext4
partition in the HDD and mount it at /home/[your user name]/.wine
(Unlike Windows, a partition in Linux can be mounted as a sub-folder.) Steam games take up a lot of space. Your steam games are in /home/[your user name]/.local/share/Steam
. See where are Steam games installed? You can create a separate Steam
(ext4
) partition in the HDD if you want. These will require a one-time edit of the file /etc/fstab
. See Mount a partition on login? for more on how to mount a partition at login.
The reason I recommend .wine to be an ext4
partition rather than a folder in the NTFS
partition is because NTFS
cannot preserve ownership and file permissions used by Ubuntu that is needed by the settings and other files stored in the .wine folder by WINE.
Between system linked folders in the NTFS
partition and ext4
partitions mounted as sub-folders of /home
you can keep all the large files in the HDD while keeping the system fast, taking advantage of the SSD.
If you still run out of space in the /
partition in SSD due to large games and other programs, you can create an ext4
partition and move /usr
there. However, this will require some planning, careful thoughts and execution. Ask a separate question if and when you need to go on that route.
As far as installing programs in /
versus the /home
see this excellent explanation of the process and its limitations: Software installed on root partition or on home partition In short, programs installed via the Ubuntu Software Center, or the command apt-get
will be installed in /
. Only "static-binary" compiled programs may be installed (rather copied) in sub-folders of /home
and expected to work.
More references:
Partitions for Ubuntu and Windows 7 dual boot on SSD + HDD setup
Setup for dual disk (SSD+HDD) with /home partition
Do I need Intel Smart Response when installing Ubuntu?
Move or Install Apps on HDD not SSD
Best Answer
You quoted the answer to your own question...
A partition is just a way to separate the files in the hard drive, it doesn't need to be a place for an operating system. If your system partition and your home partition are separated, if you upgrade your system it'll only affect the system partition, leaving your data alone.
There are other uses for a different data partition such as encrypting it or a having a different filesystem than the operating system's one.
Note that Linux treats /home, /usr, /var... as folders, even if they are separate partitions (they are mounted at bootup). So having a separate /home partition won't affect you in any negative way, go ahead and do it.
If you intend to have a server someday, I'd advise to use a separate /var partition, and probably a separate /usr and /tmp too.